My musings regarding GNU/Linux, GNU/BSD and GNU/Minix. I am in particular partial towards Debian GNU/Linux and Arch GNU/Linux. Generally these are my comments towards topics related to "Free as in Freedom" software and tips for installing and configuring Debian GNU/Linux and Arch GNU/Linux systems on laptops and other generics.

Monday, July 25, 2011

I downloaded both the DVD and the cd1 from here. I went ahead and downloaded it owing to increased activity and interest in the project by students from the GSoC project. The DVD iso download was corrupted, so downloaded the cd1 of the distribution. CD1 on hp tx1301au installation was stopped since the installer did not identify and hard disks which can be used. After posting the issue on the mailing lists, I was adviced to select IDE(legacy mode) in the bios. This was not possible with my laptop. HP has not given me any options to play with the bios settings.

Next the cd was tried out on dell m501r. Here the installer booted to graphical mode!!!!, but, behold..,, It did not recognise the cd drive itself, so it did not find the installation medium(strange). But seeing GNU/HURD run a graphical installer has kept my hopes high on this project. The installer steps are the same with Debian GNU/Linux. So anybody who has installed Debian GNU/Linux should feel at home. Congrats to the Debian GNU/Hurd team on the accomplishment.

Anybody wanting to install Debian GNU/Hurd, my recommendation would be to dust out that old desktop of yours and install. This may work out because the drivers available with Debian GNU/Hurd are the driver which have been ported from Linux kernel 2.*. So, there is all possibility of your older hardware playing nice with Debian GNU/Linux. Any further questions can be put to the mailing lists. The mailing list replies are simple and quick.

All the best with ur Debian GNU/Hurd installation. We are nearing the dream of RMS regarding the completely FaiF Operating system.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

I would like to refer the reader to the excellent blog above. My blog can be seen as a comment for the above post.

I have re-iterated many a time that Canonical is heading for a dual licensing approach code contributed in the "free as in freedom" environment. It wants to make money out of community contributions, not from its own contributions. Why should there be a community contribution agreement between an organization which is "supposed" to foster freedom software development and the contributors who believe in "free as in freedom" philosophy? We already have a plethora of licenses to chose from, we have the free software foundation to whom we can give the copyright(if we as individual contributors are not to be bothered with the legalities of it), or we could keep the copyright assignment to ourselves which is the default.

During this year's ubuntu summit, Mark spoke at length and emphasis on contributor agreements and of course(unity). I would suggest Mark to remove all the community contributions and package the unity code written by canonical into a blob. Let him sell a "me too" osX clone with his propreitory unity front end(which many others did try). Go ahead and do it. Mark, You are muddying the "free as in freedom" waters by forcing community contributos to sign the agreement to participate in their favorite projec ie, Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Mark, You might have started the ubuntu GNU/Linux with the prospect of reaping money, but now, it is beyond ur grasps. It is in the hads of the community. The day u come out with propreitory extensions and vendor specific improvements, You will definitely see a fork(As though we dont have it now ). I have warned you.

The code is contributed by the community and belongs to the community for the community at large. Mark, You will never own it. Harmony is a backdoor entry by canonical to get as much IP as possible into their lap, thereby increasing its total worth. Harmony places the complete onus of negative impact on the developer. All the positive outcomes are to be reaped by canonical. Harmony is giving a bad example to all project which are using community contributions.

I, as a user, completely desist the cacophony of the project harmony. Booooooo... canonical

The above post was my reply to mark to one of his posts. The post was related to the economics of FLOSS, in particular, it explained how the present "hobby" projects were not making money. It also tried to explain methods of raising money. Ultimately the summary was that, Mark is not getting his ROI on ubuntu GNU/Linux.After seeing all the comments in the post, I was shocked at the way, the post was interpreted. People went a step further in explaining myriad number of ways of how "Mark should make money" from Ubuntu GNU/Linux that too, from existing users.

I would like to bring to the notice of all the commenters that

1. Mark did not reply to my comment
2. Mark is not bothered about making money from the existing users. The money he would collect would be peanuts compared to the wealth he has already accumulated from his previous propreitory endeavours
3. If all the "free as in freedom" developers had thought like mark, We wouldnt have GNU/Linux and ofcourse, ubuntu GNU/Linux in the first place
4. Money is not everything for everybody.
5. If Debian HURD or Minix takes off in a big way( Exaggerated ), We again have an alternate os to tinker with. The community will start the cycle of improving the new kid. It is not difficult ot understand where ubuntu GNU/Linux stands with this.
6. If Mark is successful in pre-installing ubuntu GNU/Linux on new hardware, His restrictive ideas will see a format of the new hardware the time it is recieved and the users are once again "free" to taste freedom with Debian GNU/Linux or Debian GNU/Kfreebsd or ..... Debian GNU/Hurd.
7. At the end of the post, Mark told that he would summarize the comments on this post and include it in his next post. This has not materialized.

I think instead, Mark should go the Redhat way or the suse way and aim for corporate users with their pockets full of money. As far as the Microsoft/Apple way, Windows/osX is enough. We dont want GNU/Linux to end up in the same kind of marketing and propreitory blobosphere.

Mark, Pls leave GNU/Linux alone or just be a major contributor to both the GNU/Linux world and wikipedia universe and keep the ads at bay.

Friday, July 15, 2011

I for one would love to see Diaspora completely imitate google+. By mimicing, I meant that Diaspora should carry features on "one to one" basis. I loved the way google has implemented its social networking concept after failing multiple times. That is definitely a result of n--> infinity dollars available with google. Innovation is the key to google. I believe this is one company which completely innovates and recruits people only to innovate, not to work. Diaspora is born out of a very claear understanding of human sharing psychology. Google implemented the "aspects" in Diaspora more intuitively with "circles". The similarity ends there. The video upload, the mobile app, sparks, hangout, Huddle can be definitely credited to all the existing social networking apps.

I would love to see Diaspora reach the same amount of feature list as google plus. Why?

1. I love "free as in freedom" concept of RMS2. The layout of the page is very pleasing. This is where diaspora and google+ are on the same level of maturity3. I want the code of such a social networking setup available to the community at large.4. When the code is available to the community on a "free as in freedom" license we will see that it will be put to innumerable uses not even visualized by the original developers.5. I like Diaspora6. If anybody wants they can run their own diaspora server from their house thereby keeping the data really private and still connect to all the "diasps" across the world.

Here is my best wishes with the diaspora developers, users and community to grow and to implement features with more intuitive front ends. "circles" should be an eye opener to all the diaspora developers for very "simplistic" tech front ends.

Friday, July 8, 2011

I came across a qoute by Linus Torvalds which summed up to this 'If Mirosoft developed an app specific for the GNU/Linux environment then he had won'. This has happened now with office 360. Critics might argue that my argument is not right. But my comment comes on the fact that Microsoft is synonymous with "MS office". Many users do not know that the "MS" stands for Micro-soft. But nobody can negate me that MS office is the most widely used "application" in the computer world. Now, that application is available for the majority of the operating systems which can run a fully blown browser.

This is a clear win for Linus and it is celebration time for GNU/Linux enthusiasts. After trying all the different methods for running Office like WINE, virtualization and all other methods, we now have a cleaner method officiated by Microsoft. Kudos to Microsoft for coming out with the online office suite. In a move to counter Google, It has forgotten the amount of users it mahy lose who buy bundled msoffice. Users win. Users have forced Microsoft to come out with a cloud version of its office.

Will we have a libre office hosted on the cloud. We may and we should. That would put a bit more pressure on microsoft to see to it that office 360 worked the same and has the same features across all the OS platforms.